Eddie Griffin Dead at Age 25

Oh no.

That was my reaction to the headline that just popped up on ESPN.com, "Ex-Wolves player Griffin killed in crash." Eddie Griffin drove through a railroad warning right into a moving train in the early hours of Friday morning. His body was badly burned and wasn't identified until today.

Chris and I remember Eddie well from his one season with Seton Hall, his Freshman year, and ours as well. He was an immensely gifted basketball player. In the one game he played in the Dome, we quickly agreed that he was the best player on the court. But he also had some personal problems that made him an underachiever.

In those days, Seton Hall was in the midst of its brief tenure as my most hated team in the Big East. A year before, PG Darius Lane and company had ended Syracuse's 19-0 season in the Dome. Then in 2001, they had again handed us our first Big East loss and only our second of the season down in New Jersey in January.

In February, we came into the Dome on a seven game home winning streak. Seton Hall, on the other hand, had struggled to a 3-6 mark in league play. Eddie was a microcosm of the team that year; talented, but disappointing in the end. Still, I knew that Seton Hall was going to give us a tough game. Darius Lane had it in for us.

Indeed, he matched his 20 points from the same fixture the year before. But it was Eddie who dominated the game. 18 points, 10 boards, 3 blocks, 3 steals. Jeremy McNeil was no match for his inside-outside game. Nor was Ethan Cole, for that matter.

In front of the largest crowd of the season, we found ourselves down eight with 10 and a half remaining. I can almost remember Boeheim calling a time out right around then. We might have even gone press. Maybe that was the day that Chris pointed out how good a team we were at pressing, an part of Boeheim's arsenal that has remained under-appreciated to this day. Whatever it was, we laid down a 10 point run to get our first lead of the second half.

From there it was a back-and-forth battle. The game report I'm reading says that there were only two points over the final 2:55. Classic Big East ugliness. They came on SU's final possession, when senior Allen Griffin hit the winning bucket. Our other senior, Damone Brown, blocked a shot on the other end and the game was over, 63-62. (No tacos.)

Griffin and Brown led the Orange to the second round of the NCAAs that year, a solid effort for a team that had lost a great senior class the year before. Seton Hall ended up 16-15, losing in the first round of the NIT. Eddie jumped to the NBA.

A year later, the Orange bottomed out with the DeShaun Williams fiasco of a season. We learned that good guys, like Brown and Allen Griffin, can help a team overachieve. Bad guys can ruin a season.

Eddie Griffin was always troubled. When a basketball player's troubles are so obvious that they reveal themselves in his and his team's performance, that's a bad sign. I knew very little about Eddie, besides that he had a drinking problem and had been suspended a bunch of times by the NBA. I don't know why he had those troubles or what his life was like.

I'll be honest, I enjoyed rooting against him. Seton Hall were the bad guys to me. It was natural as an Orange fan. But this is sad. I would have much preferred a story of redemption for ol' Eddie Griffin. Instead, at the same age as I am now, he's dead. I don't know what else to do or say, but tip my cap to Eddie for the one memory of the one day when our paths crossed.